Comments on: Yet another failed attempt to argue for free will https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/
Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:26:41 +0000
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By: Aaron Schurger https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-277192
Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:26:41 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-277192The author wrote: “Further, having read the new Schurger et al. paper (reference below) that has been widely touted in the press as giving neurophysiological evidence for free will, don’t find that implication convincing…”. The author has good reason to not be convinced of this: our research does not provide evidence for the existence of free will. Our study offers a new explanation of prior evidence that has been cited against the existence of free will, which is not the same thing as arguing *for* the existence of free will. Of course, I would still encourage you to read our paper 🙂 The most important implications of our research have less to do with “free will” and more to do with the self-initiation of movement and the accompanying feeling of deciding or intending to move (what you might call “conscious will”). Our study also changes the playing field in the debate about free will, beyond simply refuting prior evidence.
Aaron Schurger, PhD
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By: Jeff Johnson https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-275322
Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:42:09 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-275322Vaal,
I agree it can be maddening and tiring. We do agree on so much. I think it really boils down to using the words ‘free will’. I don’t disagree with any of your assertions of what humans can do. After all, we’ve all known what we can do for many millenia. We just never understood why we can do it, and the explanation was ‘free will’ and ‘the soul’.

So much that is good about humans has historically been attributed to free will, that it may be painful to let go of that term. But all that goodness does not really depend on ‘free will’ as it has traditionally been viewed, which is contra-causal. It depends on the flexibility and intelligence of the brain.

Given the historical meaning of ‘free will’, I can never feel comfortable calling this flexible intelligence ‘free will’. It seems contrived and artificial to me, a contortion undertaken solely to avoid admitting that by definition, compatibilism is wrong, or out of the fear that admitting we don’t have free will would be too emotionally hurtful to people attached to the notion that humans are higher beings of some kind.

If you go back to the stoics, their idea of human freedom depended on a conception of the soul. Human cognition was free of determinism. They were effectively dualists. Thus compatibilism in stoicism is not justified by today’s compatibilism. If we compare compatibilism today to the original paradox faced by the stoics, it doesn’t seem that compatibilists have shown that we have free will. Rather, they have shown that being wholly deterministic beings is not so bad as people once suspected. Calling this ‘free will’ looks like slight-of-hand to me. This isn’t the same as showing that the stoics conception of free will, and the most common general conception of free will, is something that we actually have.

Historically ‘free will’ was an ontological category, or at least represented an ontological category, the soul. Compatibilists today admit that ‘free will’ is not some aspect of being that gives us our human capacities. They have simply turned the tables by stating that the set of human capacities that once led us to believe there was some internal freedom called ‘free will’, what used to be considered evidence of ‘free will’, has been re-imagined to be the thing itself. Seems circular and, to be charitable, unenlightening to me.

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By: Vaal https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-274766
Fri, 31 Aug 2012 03:16:19 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-274766Thanks Jeff. Too much of that inspires a response that will have to wait for another day.

On another note:

After a while of these free will discussions the sense of never being understood, of continually talking past one another becomes wearying. It’s common and expected when we are talking with theists, but it becomes almost disorientating to go through it with other atheists, once you think once we’ve removed “woo” from the table the promise of coming to agreement would be there.

Ah well…

Vaal

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By: Jeff Johnson https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-274104
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:09:23 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-274104There is no disagreement on what are true statements. Of course water in general has a nature that includes phase transitions under certain thermodynamic conditions. It does not confer any freedom if I can say the “boiling water could have remained liquid”, even though it is a true statement merely because you take advantage of the wide and sloppy latitude granted by the word ‘could’.

There is validity to looking at the general nature of water and understanding it’s tendencies in a variety of situations.

None of that changes the fact that on a particular experiment, with a particular design, there is a deterministic result that could not be different if those exact circumstances are repeated thousands or millions of times. And this is just a specific consequence of the general nature you are talking about.

Still, no freedom is introduced. The discussions of ‘could’ or ‘could’ not are a confused waste of time when it comes to talking about ‘free will’. They are only debates over how you want to draw the boundaries around the system you are studying and talking about.

Of course there are language uses of ‘free will’, which you have given examples of, that make sense in everyday usage of language. No disagreement there. If that weren’t so this debate couldn’t happen. This debate is dependent on that history of human self-image, and repeating easily understood examples of how humans talk and act does not add anything to answering the question “what is free will, and do we have it?” What understanding do we gain of water by endlessly repeating that water is wet and ice is cold? Very little if any. What counts as deeper understanding is understanding what it is about water and heat that enables us to predictably create steam or ice, and enables us to build power generators that run on steam or refrigerators and freezers.

Just as we believe we are actually “seeing” what is in the room around us, when in fact we just have an unconsciously generated approximate internal representation gleaned from the properties of photons that have scattered off of molecules around us. So do we actually see what is around us? By some practical tests, we see in a very useful way. But if we want to focus on scientific truth, no we don’t actually “see” what is around us, we have a map in our heads that is good enough to enable us to navigate our surroundings quite well, but is not identical to them in many important respects.

So you are quite correct that in everyday usage it makes sense to say ‘free will’, even though people don’t have a precise sense of what that means, but it’s good enough to convey some practical meaning.

But I still say that people think they originate their will out of nothing free of all causes, and they are wrong. This is the illusion our mind creates, just as it creates the illusion that we are perfectly seeing what is actually surrounding us.

In the way the brain works, in its underlying mechanisms, which is quite distinct from what people do or say, that characteristic we call ‘will’ is not free of anything. It is entirely subject to the structure of the brain and our genetic and environmental history.

So while practically everything you say is entirely true about human nature and language usage, you are obscuring the fact that there is no freedom in the underlying mechanisms. Sure there is practical value in discussing alternatives generalized across time or across individuals.

But still you can’t say what your concept of ‘free will’ is actually free of, except the obvious and irrelevant examples of external coercion or constraint. So adding the adjective free is questionable, without solid justification.

Your usage of ‘free will’ is a contingent cultural and linguistic phenomenon that has practical value but it obscures scientific truth. Your usage of ‘free will’ is entirely disconnected from determinism and the material causes of intelligence, and rests solely upon the cultural and linguistic by-products of human intelligence, and I can’t deny the truth of your statements within that limited context.

But it is practically a tautology to say that the ‘free will’ people always thought they had is logically equivalent to a set of behaviors we can describe using the words people invented back when they thought they had libertarian free will.

You aren’t discovering or illuminating any new truth; you are merely re-describing what is obvious to every breathing human with a slight twist on word meanings that amounts to a subtle and deceptive equivocation. I don’t see any value in this other than to calm some worries people have based on their fear of scientific truth.

It is this obscuring of scientific truth that I find particularly annoying. It seems a useless battle over turf, the desperate need to preserve an historical philosophical tradition for the purpose of coddling insecure minds with reassurances that they are still pretty darn special, even though they aren’t as magnificently special and magical as they have always thought they were. I’ve explained perhaps more clearly why I think the insistence that we possess something called ‘free will’ is pointless and harmful in #30.

Drat, just as I thought we were getting closer, I find I’d have to protest most of what you claim in your recent posts.

There is no freedom from causation or determinism, which is what “free will” has always implied.

That’s simply not the case. The concept of free will is like morality – it has has not been the sole possession of one brand of thought, but has been conceived of from various angles as far back as we can look. Way before the mechanistic vision from modern science ever started providing puzzles for free will, the infallible knowledge and the great power of the Gods had put the same question about our freedom. In the face of the issues there have been determinist/incompatibilist, libertarian and compatibilist formulations of free will.

We can imagine there is free will, just as we can imagine a full tank or turning left instead of right. None of this imagining makes it so, and it is silly to think or say it does.

Who is talking about pure imagination???

We are talking about our ability to make true statements about the world, to have knowledge of it, to predict it. All of which REQUIRE that we ultimately think in terms of understanding the “nature” of any entity. Reducing our ability to know truths about the world only to “what happened at X time” would utterly impoverish our ability to know and communicate truths about the world.

Water can turn into ice OR it can turn into vapour. That is a true statement, right? Obviously the truth of that statement assumes a jiggling of the variables – temperature for instance. But that is how we understand the nature of water. The same information, the same TRUTH, is conveyed by saying “the water turned to ice but it COULD have turned into vapour (had the surrounding temperature been high enough).

If you can’t admit it’s actually true that I could have turned left instead of right, had I desired to do so – if you think it is somehow “cheating” to include such variables as “if I’d desired to,” then it’s the same as saying we are cheating everywhere else in our empirical descriptions which rely on the same if/then descriptions. So this talk of “woo” just never needs to arise.

But then maybe you want to say only in the context of the free will question it’s cheating to add the “if I so desired” part to make the statement true. But…why? It’s the common way we make truth claims about every other empirical domain, so it’s just special pleading to say we can’t speak this way about the empirical facts of our choice making. And I argue this underwrites our common claims about what we could and could not have done in a situation.
(These claims tend to be generalizations from sets of previous experience, hence claims about the nature of our powers, and NOT simply claims of dualism or acausality).

If we say something is free, then we must be able to say what it is free of. External constraint or coercion can be dismissed as inconsequential to this question because they are external and we are asking about what is supposed to be an innate internal capacity of the human mind. Anyone who wants to claim there is ‘free will’ had better be prepared to say what it is free of.

Sorry, but that’s ridiculous! You may as well say “if someone is going to explain to me the use of a temperature gauge, we first have to dismiss the concept of heat, and talk only of the internal capacity of the gauge.” That would be silly since the very justification of the temperature gauge is it’s relationship with external heat. Same with the compatibilist concept of free will, where free will is the relationship between expressing our will and external constraints put on expressing our will. You can’t just beg the entire question and dismiss that very relationship out of hand!

Free will concerns the description of my powers to exercise my will (my conscious desire to do X) in a given situation. Freedom can come in a sliding scale. – My “freedom to do X” will relate to how much constraint/coercion is placed on my fulfilling that desire. If I say “I turned right of my own free will” it is a claim that I had the unimpeded ability to perform that action, fulfilling my desire. “Could it have been otherwise?” Yes, construction may have made that turn impossible. In which case, if my will to turn left were externally impeded I could say I was not sitting at that intersection of my own free will (I actually wanted to turn, but could not). Could I have made that right turn but NOT of my own free will? Yes, someone may have been coercing me with a gun to make a turn when I actually desired to be at home with my family. Of course it was an act of my will, fulfilling another desire – the desire to stay alive – that formed the basis of my capitulating to the demands of the gun holder. But here we are talking about how our making the turn was more an expression of the desire of the person with the gun, than it was of our un-coerced desires. Again, in real life, a sliding scale will come in concerning just how opposed our own desires were to that of the person holding the gun.

If I say “I chose the soup of my own free will” it means I could have done otherwise – not chosen it or chosen a sandwich instead. If it’s true such things ware physically possible around that time, had I the desire to do them instead, then I was “free” to choose form among those variables. All of these rely on extrapolations from past experience, and allow for variables of desire. And it all depends on the context. This is in fact how we tend to talk about free willed choices in real life. I’m not describing some new, novel “choice” or free will.
(In contrast, some incompatibilists start casting our ability to “do otherwise” as an “illusion.”
Yet they still want to hang on to and use the word “choice.” But since the common understanding of having a “choice” assumes the possibility of actually choosing A or B or C…, then it’s the incompatibilists who is now using terms idiosyncratically, relative to the common conception).

Anyway…vacation time calls….I gotta go read a novel or something.

Vaal.

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By: Ron Murphy https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-273068
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:52:06 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-273068As I said there, with regard to fatalism, it depends on what type of fatalism you ar referring to. The lap of the gods, “I can’t choose to do anything so I might as well do nothing” is no more than being deterministically caused to do nothing – contingent of course on actually being able to do nothing, which would not only seem to contradict biologically driven processes but also the 2nd law.

We have no choice but to do stuff. So stressing over what might or might not have happened had the gods not willed it or not seems to be a fear related to this type of unhealthy fatalism. By living by that fatalism you’d still be doing something, but maybe a different kind of something.

Wondering if determinism will lead to a fatalism like this, and a disablement of the self, as Dennett supposes, is a mistake. Deterministic view of illusory free-will need not. A determinist fatalism is merely an acceptance of the deterministic state of our being, and being comfortable with that.

Take a look at some of these videos:

say the one at about at 0:38 where the white van just misses the guy near the camera. What would the two possible responses be to that?

“Wow, that was close. Thank you God for making it miss me!” (not generally you’ll note, “God you shit, why did you scare me like that!”) “I was destined to survive that.”, “Someone up there is looking out for me.”, “My fate is in the hands of the gods.”

Alternatively, “Wow, that was close. Shit happens. It just happened not to happen to me on this occasion. Now, what was I doing? Oh, yes. On to the pub. I have a new anecdote to tell.”

A deterministic fatalism won’t revent the biological response of shock when we experience a near miss, or worse, when we suffere the loss of a loved one. But it can help you get through it. I think it has the same therapeutic effect as atheism can have in this sense. Some theists wonder how we atheists deal with the prospect of death. Well, when it’s done it’s done. What’s there to worry about, other than the dying itself.

What I don’t have answers to are the following. I wonder what the psychology and neurobiology of all this is. Is this peaceful fatalism a consequence of my atheism and philosophical determinism, or is it my mental makeup that makes it easy for me to accept these philosophies once I’ve decided they are rational. Is it the mental make-up that prevents theists seeing life this way, that drives them to seek religious explanations, the after-life and so on? Is it the loss of free-will that still narks compatibilists, even though they have squared themselves with the rationality of determinism?

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By: Jeff Johnson https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-272936
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:17:42 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-272936I would say (as I have in another post) that such reasoning requires omniscience, which we don’t have, and it assumes the entire universe is deterministic. I think the determinism of the Universe is an open question, or at least I don’t know the answer to it. But fatalism is simply not warranted by our experience, nor is it an effective living strategy.

I would also say, look at how people think and behave in practice. We consider options from a finite range of possibilities and we assign risks and probabilities to avoid problems and harm and encourage desirable outcomes.

It’s the only way an intelligent non-omniscient being can proceed in a universe that is way more complex than our mental capacity, regardless of whether it is all deterministic or not. It’s the only way we can proceed without the wherewithal to predict the future, regardless of whether it is determined or not.

But within this larger framework our brain and body work according to the deterministic properties of biochemistry. This is the important aspect of determinism that matters for ‘free will’.

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By: Jeff Johnson https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-272892
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:48:04 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-272892Absolutely correct, degrees of freedom is not freedom from causality, otherwise we wouldn’t have it. Degrees of freedom could be stated as something like the dimensionality of the space of all possible human behaviors, which must be a large number. For example the degrees of the freedom of movement of the hand to make fundamentally different movements alone must number in the many thousands. And our brain is much more complex than that.

This is not free will. This is the latitude offered us by the extraordinary capacity of our mind and body within the constraints of causality and determinism and physical law. It seems the compatibilist notion of free will piggy-backs on this complexity. It seems to me like a kind of obscurity via large numbers; it’s like going to the beach and looking out to sea and thinking “this must go on forever and ever”. Of course it doesn’t. And of course humans are not free of limits and constraints, we just have a large range of possibilities so we feel free.

That kind of freedom, you could say, is free of the severe constraints of say a rock or a plant or a leaf blowing in the wind. But it isn’t the kind of infinite free will we actually feel like we have when we make decisions. Thus modern compatibilism seems to me a substantial retreat from what it must have been in the days of the stoics, with respect to what you consider ‘free will’ to be.

That’s why I can’t escape the uncomfortable feeling that compatibilism today is a huge disappointment that doesn’t add anything and rests entirely on a convenient and somewhat dishonest equivocation on what ‘free will’ means. The question used to be how do we fit this speculative determinism with the overwhelming evidence of human freedom? Now the question is how do we salvage some scraps of freedom from the overwhelming body of evidence for determinism? And you get this right: we have control and autonomy and the possibility of joy and pleasure that is worth having. But I don’t think anyone ever doubted that. We are all living breathing humans who experience all these things; to doubt it would be incredibly stupid. And it seems a popular compatibilist straw man is to exaggerate the meaning of statements about determinism at a low conceptual level to falsely infer that incompatibilists don’t believe that we have ordinary everyday human behavior at a higher conceptual level. This is nothing but a childish game that is very annoying.

So compatibilism reminds us that the discovery of a deterministic basis of the brain doesn’t invalidate and eliminate all of human behavior. Duh. And even though this is obviously true on it’s surface, it takes some puzzling out to understand how this is, which compatibilists have done a good deal of, but this doesn’t amount to salvaging the original notion of ‘free will’. It just isn’t equivalent to the long standing subjective concept of having the freedom to will whatever we wish to without constraint.

The usual “hmm, think I’ll have a peach” kind of free will that most people care about is fully grounded in experience and evolutionary causes.

Maybe something eludes you in the statement “We are free to do what we want, but we are not free to will what we want”.

The fact that you want a peach is not a free choice. The fact that you are hungry and a peach seems desirable and that you know and remember what peach tastes like is not something that comes freely out of nowhere, drawn from a frictionless infinite space of options. None of it is free of causality. Your choice has a complex set of causes that depend on the state of your body, as does the desire that motivates the choice.

So what is ‘free will’ free of? You haven’t answered that question. As I see it, our will is not freely chosen, but caused by the state of our brain and body. So it isn’t free of anything, yet we do have broad latitude within our constraints so that life is worth living.

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By: Another Matt https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/yet-another-failed-attempt-to-argue-for-free-will/#comment-272807
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:05:30 +0000http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?p=70161#comment-272807Compatibilists have a problem: we have to constantly deny that our stance is the same as dualism or that we really do espouse contra-causal free will for humans.

I think a lot could be resolved in this discussion if you could tell us what you would say to the kind of person who believes that determinism implies the following:

1) There is no meaningful difference between an automobile and a roller coaster – they both go where they are determined to go.

2) The only “dangerous” bullet is the one that connected. If one passes by my ear it wasn’t dangerous because it was determined not to hit my head.

3) It’s meaningless to say that an unwanted state of affairs was “avoided,” because that state of affairs never was manifest in the world, so nothing ever existed that can be described as that situation, so there was literally nothing to avoid.

4) Nobody can influence their future. The future is whatever happens deterministically, and we haven’t an ounce of control over it.

I see this kind of person as a “problem for your side” in the same way that the dualists are a problem for ours. If you could clear this up, I think that we inhabit exactly the same middle ground in all but semantics.

If we say something is free, then we must be able to say what it is free of.

Just a moment ago you said that humans do have “degrees of freedom.” What does that freedom mean? It’s certainly never meant “freedom from causation,” at least in engineering or statistics.

Anyone who claims we have free will should try this challenge: think a thought or will something that has never been thought or willed before, and that is without connection to any thought that has ever been thought or willed before.

This sounds like mental illness, and not the kind of ability anyone would want to have on a moment’s reflection. The usual “hmm, think I’ll have a peach” kind of free will that most people care about is fully grounded in experience and evolutionary causes.

Further, not even a dualist could claim that anyone could meet your challenge even in principle (except, now that you’ve carved out that concept, they might claim that god can do it).